Flowable solid materials (herein "flowable solids", "particulates", or variants thereof) include, inter alia, agricultural grains, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and synthetics in pellet or granular form. Flowable solids are frequently handled in bulk; and, consequently, specialized technologies are needed for transporting, storing, and transferring them.
Consumers of flowable solid materials in agriculture and industry frequently need to transfer flowable solids from one container to another. As an example, agricultural grain sometimes needs to be transferred quickly and efficiently from a truck to a storage bin; or from a storage bin to a truck, etc.
Conventional methods of transporting and transferring flowable solids have been less than fully acceptable. One conventional method involves both transporting and transferring flowable solid material in barrels. Handling barrels is quite difficult and loss of flowable solid material during transfer may occur when barrels are used. This is due to their size, shape, and weight. Conventional barrels are quite heavy and have large openings at their top. When transferring material from a barrel to another container spillage may occur or dust (airborne) may be generated.
Another problem with barrels is that they take up as much room empty as they do when full. Shippers may want to reuse barrels. They would therefore have the barrels returned when empty. However, the large volume occupied by empty barrels would create undesirable shipping expense One alternative solution, destruction of the barrels after a single use, solves the problem of wasted storage and shipping space, but wastes the resources represented by the empty barrels.
Another conventional method of transferring flowable solids uses flexible sacks holding about 100 pounds of material. There are a number of problems associated with use of these sacks. In particular, the sacks are subject to breakage during shipping, thus leading to spillage and loss of product. In addition, large shipments require a large number of sacks, each of which must be filled, transported and stacked. Also, loss of material or dust generation may accompany transfer of the flowable solids from the sacks to a container. In addition the lack of automation in this conventional method inhibits transfer from one closed container to another closed container.